“Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers.”
—Edward Snowden
June 2013
21 posts
“About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept. 3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as “other militants,” the documents detail. The “other militants” label was used when the CIA could not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security […] Yet officials seem certain that however many people died, and whoever they were, none of them were non-combatants. In fact, of the approximately 600 people listed as killed in the documents, only one is described as a civilian. The individual was identified to NBC News as the wife or girlfriend of an al Qaeda leader. ”
—Richard Engel and Robert Windrem, EXCLUSIVE: CIA didn’t always know who it was killing in drone strikes, classified documents show
“Putting the AAP in charge of implementing public access policies is thus the logical equivalent of passing a bill mandating background checks for firearms purchasing and putting the NRA in charge of developing and operating the database. They would have no interest in making the system any more than minimally functional. Indeed, given that the AAP clearly thinks that public access policies are bad for their businesses, they would have a strong incentive to make their implementation of a public access policy as difficult to use and as functionless as possible in order to drive down usage and make the policies appear to be a failure.”
—Mike Eisen, A CHORUS of boos: publishers offer their “solution” to public access
“But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones.”
—Julian Assange, The Banality of Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’
May 2013
28 posts
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“The clear purpose of Obama’s speech was to comfort progressives who are growing progressively more uncomfortable with his extreme secrecy, wars on press freedom, seemingly endless militarism and the like. For the most part, their discomfort is far more about the image being created of the politician they believed was unique and even transcendent than it is any substantive opposition to his policies. No progressive wants to believe that they placed such great trust and adoration in a political figure who is now being depicted as some sort of warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney. That creates internal discomfort and even shame. This speech was designed to allow progressives once again to see Barack Obama as they have always wanted to see him, his policies notwithstanding: as a deeply thoughtful, moral, complex leader who is doing his level best, despite often insurmountable obstacles, to bring about all those Good Things that progressives thought they would be getting when they empowered him.”
—Glenn Greenwald, Obama’s terrorism speech: seeing what you want to see
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HARRY SHEARER: Before we get into the details of the pretrial proceedings, one more question about that. As you sit there day after day working your way through these proceedings and creating these transcripts, what’s your best guess as to why the rest of the press isn’t covering this?
ALEXA O’BRIEN: I think this has multiple layers to it. I think on one sense, if we look at it purely from the bottom-line perspective, is that WikiLeaks represents a challenge to the market power that the mainstream media organizations have over audiences. And of course you know it costs a lot of money up-front to produce news and especially investigative journalism and entertainment. It costs relatively little in the digital age to distribute it. And so therefore control of audiences is very, very important as these media organizations enter this new era. So I think that they’ve taken a defensive posture towards WikiLeaks because of that fundamentally, and I think also it’s a question of access to information. I mean, WikiLeaks, the reason why it’s so revolutionary is that it allows the janitor to leak and not simply the high-level Obama administration authorized leak to, you know, Bob Woodward, so to speak, to sell war or a particular political agenda of the elites. So there’s a lot going on here that is reason for them not to cover it.
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“The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America’s innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.”
—Glenn Greenwald, “Washington gets explicit: its ‘war on terror’ is permanent”
LEIF HAVEN
THE CORPSE OF OUR SEPARATE YOUTHS
What do you call a jar of salsa with a thumb in it?
You can call it whatever you want but to me itonly means my wedding night. I wore a dress
made of reeds. We canoed down the burning Susquehanna.We paddled the corpse of our separate youths into a new life
together. You never mentioned that you were the pigeon man.Oh my god, look at the air. There isn’t much time
put the reactor core under your shirt. We’ve only gotone chance.
